Sadly, this imaginary conversation summarizes one of today’s realities. Simple ranking results no longer reflect the actual growth of an online business.

This happens because of three major Google factors that change the way the SERPs look:

1. Localization
2. Universal search
3. Personalization

Subsequently, this affects the way searchers behave when choosing a webpage from the result lists they see in browser.

Advanced Web Ranking already helps you handle the Location and Universal search factors, with the integration of the Google Location and Google Universal search engines.

With the release of the new AWR 8.8 version, you can now approach the third factor – Personalization – by keeping a close eye on your social media activity.

Looking from the social media perspective, personalized search is effective only when the searchers you target are logged in their Google accounts. In this case, the search engine returns a personalized list of results for each individual, which includes pages recommended by his friends.

To reach this audience, you need to build a strong social media presence, constantly monitoring reactions to your content and activities.

There are three steps you need to consider for a reliable social media monitoring: listen, analyze and relate information to past events. Here is how AWR helps you manage all of them together in an unified framework:

1. Listen to your audience

There is a good reason why people have two ears and only one mouth … Listening to your audience is the key ingredient of a good social media communication strategy. The scope is to gather relevant information, based on which you can further take informed decisions for your online business.

AWR helps you easily monitor to what extent your content reaches the targeted audience, as well as the feedback you receive. With the new Social Media feature, from the left vertical menu bar, you have access to three social media interactive reports, each managing a different set of data.

The Social Shares report is one of the most powerful weapons in your new social media arsenal. Besides gathering valuable insights about your content, it allows you to peek at your competitors’ social media shares and compare their evolution to yours.

This is possible since the information is retrieved directly for the website pages monitored in your AWR project, without the need to access a specific social media profile.

Facebook, Twitter and Google +1 shares are displayed both in a comprehensive chart and in a comparison table, with the ability to select the specific date range you are interested in.

2. Analyze the feedback you receive

The art of building strong relationships with others is always based on the ability to analyze conversations.

Twitter, for example, is an environment where you can engage discussions with tens of people. Seeing the actual content of their mentions or retweets, organized in a comprehensive table, helps you analyze reactions to your social activity.

For example, mentions of your profile are retrieved along with information about the related users. Matching a mention’s content with the user that generated it helps you identify and further manage your most important relationships.

You can switch between different Twitter metrics by selecting the one you are interested in from the top filter box.

3. Relate to previous information

New information becomes much more valuable once you can relate it to past events. This is a key factor in understanding your audience trend.

With the new Facebook interactive report in AWR, you can see historic information on the number of Likes, New Likes and Talking about that your Facebook page gain.

This helps you identify possible problems in your social media communication strategy.

For example, by comparing the number of Likes with the number of New Likes over a period of time, you can see if the content you promote on this channel keeps the interest of your fans alive. If the values for the first metric is constant and those for the second metric show an increasing trend, this indicates that, in time, existing fans tend to leave your side.

All this information helps you make an overall evaluation of your social media activity, and periodically monitor the effects of your communication decisions.

Conclusion

Personalization is the factor that brings the most dramatic change to the way SERPs look. Social signals being integrated in Google’s mechanisms to interpret the relevance of results makes it more and more difficult to measure the actual effect of high non-personalized rankings.

The way to approach this is by reaching a wider audience each day, with good quality content. After all, this is not so different from Google’s scope which is to provide searchers with the most relevant and trustworthy results.

Integrating the Social Media feature, Advanced Web Ranking helps you monitor your activity on the social media channels and evaluate your efforts, so you can further act upon them.

I hope you have enjoyed reading this article. I am looking forward to reading some of your user experience tips in the comments section below.

About Aura Dozescu

Aura Dozescu is the Dir. of Business Development for the AWR Cloud. Passionate about Internet Marketing and SEO technologies, she is working closely with seo software developers to implement the feedback received from customers. Connect with her on Google+

I love the new social stuff integration. It’s very useful if you ask me.

Anna

can’t wait to check this!
it looks like you guys have everything now

http://twitter.com/philippetrescu Philip Petrescu

My wish has come true. Santa arrived a bit early this year

Anne Marie Stewart

It’s awesome!! No Google+ data though…. I assume you are working on this?

http://www.facebook.com/aura.dozescu Aura Dozescu

Good point Anne Marie
Google +1 shares are included now only in the Social Shares report. We plan the integration of more complex Google +1 stats in our next version

Zachary Jones

This is really great improvemnt.

I was wondering… I didn’t see in the artice anything abut the update. If it’s done separate by the ranking updates, will I have to wait twice the time to update the project? And are we going to get banned for this?

Thanks

http://www.facebook.com/aura.dozescu Aura Dozescu

Hi Zachary

The social media is not connected with ranking updates. The information is retrieved with an independent process, either for each social media report, direclty from the report screen, or for all three reports at the same time, from the Update Social option in the Update menu. AWR gathers the social media data from different sources, and can run this type of updates at the same time with ranking updates. Thus, the process does not increase the duration of ranking updates, and there is no risk of getting banned by search engines.

http://www.eugenoprea.com Eugen Oprea

Excellent!

These social media features ad some extra power to Advanced Web Ranking. The new version looks fabulous!

http://www.facebook.com/aura.dozescu Aura Dozescu

Thank you all for your feedback!
Hope you are having a great time playing with the new features

Rob

Any way we can see past data, or just from today?

http://www.facebook.com/aura.dozescu Aura Dozescu

Hi Rob,
For the time being, you can see events in the past, which occurred before your first social media update in AWR, only in the Twitter report. The Facebook and Social Shares reports can display data over time starting from the date of your first social media update.We are already working on integrating the mechanism to retrieve stats that were recorded before the first update in AWR also for the Facebook report.

SEO_Guevara

Really great – but big question is when can we epxect some reportin ?

http://www.facebook.com/aura.dozescu Aura Dozescu

Thank you for your comment! Social Media reporting is included in our next AWR version we are preparing to release. We are already adding the final touches

http://www.facebook.com/pagetraffic Page Traffic

Wish we could integrate these in reporting we do for our clients.
Right now it seems there is no way to do it

auradozescu

As promissed, we integrated the reporting function for social media in version 8.9. You can generate HTML reports with the quick report feature, available on the top menu bar, or you can generate a complete seo report with rankings, analytics, links and social media data integrated, also in HTML format. These reports are browsable and users can select in real time what they want to see. Have fun testing them

Michael Davies

I have a slight problem with the social shares area. It doesn’t seem to update itself when I run a report. Is there a setting I am missing somewhere?

Also when I click the ‘update’ section in Social Shares it creates all the reports I have set for the client and emails them out.

awrblog

The social media data should be updated just by using the Update button in the Social menu. If your project doesn’t updates, it would be best to send to our support team an error report from this project. This will help them see your exact settings and find where the problem is.

For each update you make within the application, Advanced Web Ranking will generate and attempt to send by email all the reports that have the options “Generate report after each update” and “Send report by email” enabled. However, to send the reports by email, Advanced Web Ranking requests your confirmation through a dialog displayed right after the update is completed.

So if you don’t want to send the reports at some updates, you can just click “No” when the confirmation dialog pops. If you wish to stop generating a report at each update, go to Reports -> the desired report -> the “Save to local file” section -> “Deploy” and disable the option.